After the parliamentary elections of December 2005, the National Electoral Council of Venezuela took more than 42 days to announce results. The CNE, at the time chaired by Jorge Rodriguez (later appointed Chavez’s Vice President), had trouble massaging abstention figures, which to this day are believed to have been above 85%. The current crop of people’s representatives were elected in 2005 by at best, 15% of Venezuela's electorate. Eventually, Rodriguez did come up with figures more amenable to the caudillo, decreasing the abstention rate to around 75%.

On taking special powers this week to rule by decree, President Chávez of Venezuela declared: “We’re building a new democracy here that can’t be turned back.” By describing these political changes as irreversible, he revealed the type of democracy that he had in mind: one person, one vote, where he is the person and his is the vote.

The arrest in Colombia of Venezuelan drug kingpin Walid Makled has exposed the underworld of drugs, corruption, and organised crime that surrounds President Hugo Chavez. As I wrote back in 2006, it is simply impossible to ship tonnes of cocaine to international markets without complicity at the highest levels. And complicity Walid Makled revealed.

Gone are the days when Hugo Chavez could be given the benefit of the doubt. In fact, long gone is the argument that Chavez ‘has the support of the vast majority of Venezuelans’. In recent elections, hand picked candidates running for Congress from the President's ruling and allied parties got 48% of the vote, while candidates selected by the opposition pulled in 52%. This tremendous electoral victory in a context similar to that of Iran, went somewhat misreported by the media.

A journalist from Diario La Verdad, in Venezuela. A journalist from The Christian Science Monitor, in Madrid. Another from Agencia COLPISA, also in Madrid. The director of PROVEA, a human rights NGO in Caracas. Venezuelan Ambassador to Spain. An ETA terrorist, Arturo Cubillas. A collective of so called journalists in Venezuela... What do these people have in common?

I'm reading a book about an alleged infiltration into the world of transnational terrorism by an undercover Spanish journalist that goes by the name of Antonio Salas. While I am not prepared to take everything written by Salas at face value, there's an undeniable wealth of information in the book that allows anyone with a modicum of interest to follow leads.

The Guardian's Comment is Free has published an article by fellow blogger Francisco Toro. One can get a flavour of the prevailing mentality of people commenting about it, with arguments such as "I am shocked that the Guardian has published such overt and obvious propaganda.

Thanks to the kind soul that sent me the official crime report, made by Venezuela's Institute of National Statistics (INE), I can see that whoever wrote about it at El Nacional, seems to have gotten the numbers wrong: the following table, from the report (page 67), shows that 21,132 homicides took place in Venezuela in 200

A great exchange of ideas took place the other day in the comment section of an article published by Miguel Octavio. Miguel was basically pondering on the difficulties of explaining to foreigners the reality of our country, as cited below:

El Pais reports that Jaime Granados, legal representative of -as of today- former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe formally filed, on Friday, a lawsuit against Hugo Chavez before the International Criminal Court (ICC), for violations against the Rome Statute and human rights.

As expected, it hasn't taken long since elections for outraged Filipinos to sue Smartmatic for negligence, incompetence, corruption, and unethical behaviour, in violation to various legislations. René Azurin argues:

In what could well be the final nail in the coffin of Hugo Chavez international standing, outgoing Alvaro Uribe has acted on the pile of evidence of Chavez - FARC links he's been sitting on, and ordered his minister of defence to release information that proves the presence of Colombian narco terrorists in Venezuela.

There was a time, not long ago, when bloggers such as your truly were frantically exposing the turpitude, the sheer corruption, the conflict of interests, and the galloping fascism of chavismo: a cult based on an untenable premise, which has it that its supreme leader, Hugo Chavez, is absolutely infallible. To chavistas, the Venezuelan caudillo can do no wrong. Simple. He is, in fact, beyond criticism, embodiment of some saintly figure.

Early in 2008 I started working for the Human Rights Foundation (no longer there). One of the first assignments I got was to investigate the human rights situation in Bolivia and Ecuador, a couple of countries that had fallen under the chavista formula of using democratic tools to destroy the very tenets, such as rule of law and due process, that sustain democracy.